SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Writers Make $100k/year on Content SaaS Marketplace Verblio, $9m Revenue
06 May 2021
Chapter 1: What is Verblio and how does it operate in the content marketplace?
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Now look, I never want money to be the reason you can't listen to episodes. On the checkout page, you'll see an option to request free access. I grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Steve Pokras. He's building a great company. It's Marketplace Plus SaaS for content creation. It's called Verblio.com.
He brings more than 25 years of experience to startup, Fortune 500, a nonprofit, to his role, years of experience there, to his role at Verblio. He previously served as VP of Business Development and Strategy for a Marketplace Plus SaaS pioneer called LiveOps, as well as leadership roles at Tendril, Western Union, and HSBC. He received his MBA from Kellogg. and is an MA from Wesleyan University.
Steve, you ready to take us to the top? Ready. All right. So LiveOps, OG SaaS plus marketplace stuff happening here. What's Verblio working on? Uh, verbally I was working a lot where, uh, we're, we're riding a pretty big content wave as it becomes a more and more powerful tool for marketing.
Uh, and we're, we've got, I think we're going to create 80,000 pieces of unique content this year with 3000 writers working on our SaaS platform. And, uh, yeah, we keep trying to focus on our mission, which is high quality content at scale for every niche. That's interesting. Okay. So you think we'll do 3k writers on a platform this year who put together 80k pieces.
What were those same numbers for last year? So the same numbers for last year were around 60,000 pieces of content. And how many writers? So about the same. It's interesting. We're actually going down in writers. Part of my fine-tuning philosophy of how to get more out of your marketplace is to actually use the right size pool. So we started the company with 10,000. We're down to 3,000.
And I hope to be using 1,000 active writers by the end because I think it's the right balance of getting the power of scalability and quality or scalability out of your marketplace without sacrificing quality. course. Now, what do you I mean, I imagine a key measure that you measure is on average, what is the writer going to earn on verbal? Yo, what is that? We do.
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Chapter 2: How many writers and pieces of content does Verblio produce?
And so that's been a big difference in our business. The churn on those accounts that are basically we consider enterprise $1,000 and above, churn at 2% per month. Our largest, I don't know how many... I think we're somewhere between five to seven clients at 20,000 a month. Those don't churn. They have 0%.
And then the lower marketplace that you brought up the question for, they turn around nine, I think eight to 9% now it's really gone down from, I think 10 to 12 last time I talked to you. And they're just, it's a different business. It's a subscription month to month. There's no long-term. Some people have short-term needs for, so there's a variety of reasons. One is,
The clients could have a short-term need for content. They could see it for a few months. Another is they could have not done it before. A lot of them are agencies that went in for one client and their contract went away. And some of them we might not be a good fit for. And I don't know why, but I think they should try again. And so what does that mean in terms of MRR?
10, 20 customers, 800 bucks a pop. You're doing what? 800 grand a month in revenue these days? Yeah, we're crossing 750 and we should be at 830, 840 within the next two months. That's great. And then yeah, during COVID. So at the beginning of COVID, we chatted, I think you said you're at like a 6 million run rate. So you finished last year at somewhere around like a 8 million run rate.
Is that right? So we finished with 6 million in revenue and a run rate of around seven plus. And we've had a pretty big growth first four months of the year. Yeah. Interesting. Where's that growth coming from? The growth is coming from large customers that are looking at content as at scale. They really have a need to do, well, they're thinking of content as competitive advantage.
What I mean by that jargon is that a lot of them are building their businesses based on content. So the first wave, when we first talked a couple of years ago, it was small businesses trying to keep five logs afloat. Wave two was digital agencies that went up market. We were solving a big pain point for them. How do you manage content? Do it by vertical or do it at scale.
And this next wave is really coming from really large clients that are thinking, how do you build the business? If you have a company like Verbally or Powering You, where you can do quality content at scale for any niche, which is a pretty, it's kind of the fuel of the modern marketing engines. And a lot of people are thinking more creatively about how to use it.
Now, have you changed your team dynamic at all? Last time I spoke to your 22 people or 20 or 17 people, I believe. How many people today? Yeah, we're 31 now and we have seven open recs and we should end the year at 40. We're on a, we've done a lot. What are you hiring for salespeople? What engineers? It is super balanced across the company.
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Chapter 3: What strategies does Verblio use to ensure content quality?
So because we're bootstrapped, as you know, um, which is one of your favorite topics as well. is that the dynamic is you invest behind the curve. You invest six months after you really needed that person. We basically are adding incrementally to all parts of the business as we need them. How many engineers today? We have seven engineers today. Any sales reps that carry quota?
We had one sales rep for four years, and now we have three, and our first executive VP of sales. That's a big hire. Yeah. So most of our focus is on driving marketing, brand, driving SEO, and living the content dream of if you build it, people will come to you. How are you? I mean, it's interesting to ask the content guy how he's thinking about SEO.
Are you thinking about SEO from a content perspective or like programmatic SEO where you're sort of auto-launching pages, comparison pages, things like that? It's interesting. Our next big phase will be productizing content, so moving a lot more into the second part that you said. So far, we've really been following what the market demand is, knowing that we had something really valuable.
The next phase is, how do we take some of these ideas like SEO refreshes? How do you revamp pages at scale and turn those into products?
Chapter 4: How much can writers earn on the Verblio platform?
Yeah, there's a lot of them. Video falls into that bucket, too, that we still have a lot of work to do to build out our video company that we bought a couple years ago. Tell me about that video company. So we bought a company called Automagical, which is very similar to... Sorry. I've been out of it for a while.
So similar to other players in the market that are trying to take existing content and turn them into videos by using AI, the twist that we put on it is I think that the main goal of that video technology should be to dramatically reduce the cost of creating the video as opposed to fine-tuning the quality. So we then put our writers on.
Once the video comes, it has a great draft that the AI created. And I think that's about 50% there. And then we have our writers go in and finish the story to have a much higher level product at a lower cost. Interesting. Very cool. Now talking about capital needs, you have to correct me if I'm wrong here. Were you the founder of the company or did you come in after founding?
I was hired by the founders about four and a half years ago. Got it. And are the founders still active in the company or are they left? They are both out of the company and they're both on the board. So how do you guys think about, you don't need to think about this really because you're not raising capital, but if you were going to put a valuation on a company, how would you think about it?
So unfortunately, there's not as many comps as I would like in the space. I think marketplace and SaaS has really taken off and I appreciate your support and fostering the terminology to get there. And so I think, you know, you...
There's a variety, like you have your marketplace options, like you've got your Upworks that they have their valuations, you have your SaaS companies, and then you have your services companies that are clearly much more towards the one-to-one revenue and nowhere near as high as the five to 10 to 15 of the rest of them. So I think it's still yet to be defined of how much value is here.
And I think it's up to the industry to prove out what we can do that's different than anybody else and how it's a more powerful platform before we get there. So- Right now, it's basically comps and conversations, but I hope it gets a lot more towards the five plus than it does towards the one.
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Chapter 5: What is Verblio's revenue model and how does it scale?
If someone offered you guys $100 million today, about 11x multiple, do you take it? Yeah. Yeah. There you go. Direct answer. We like that on the show. Steve, on that note, let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite business book? It's currently Alchemy, the Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life by Rory Sutherland.
He was ready for that one. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? You know, I love David Cancel. He was just on my podcast, and I find him deeply inspiring in the way he thinks about brand and the things about people and all of the intangibles that build a great business. Well, hey, let's give your podcast some love here.
Why, as a SaaS plus marketplace brand, why'd you launch a podcast and what's it called? The podcast is called Yes and Marketing based on the improv idea that marketing ideas can come, great marketing ideas can come from anywhere and there are no best practices in marketing.
So I talked to inspired leaders and inspired marketers with the idea of we're going to learn from any of them with the idea of like the focus of our company is really a lot more on building new marketing capability than it is on marketing. you know, the basic idea of delivering a service. And people can find that on iTunes, I assume? Please, everywhere. I hope you like it.
Say it again, the title? Yes, and marketing. Yes, and marketing. Very cool. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building verbally up? You know, I know this is boring, but I'm going to say Slack and Slack because, God, it's so fundamental to how we created a great remote culture during this meantime.
Everyone's on all times of day on all sorts of channels, just creating water cooler talk in a way that would have never been possible before. So I think I think about it much more from cultural than I do from process driven kind of productivity. Number four, how many hours of sleep are you getting every night? Oh man, last year.
So I aim for six to eight, but coronavirus has not been very helpful. I have the whole Corona somnia thing that I know many of us are suffering through. Number four, our situation, married, single kiddos. Married, two kids, 10 and 13 boys living in Colorado. Gives lots of outdoor time and fun things to do. Older Colorado. How old are you, Steve? I am 48. 48. Last question.
What's something you wish you knew when you were 20? man, every step along, I was thinking about my career, every step along the way that I did something that I thought would be good for my resume versus what I wanted to do was a mistake. So I worked for large companies, three giant banks, all of them went terribly horrible, terribly wrong. It's just not a cultural fit.
So I wish I would do what I felt like doing, which I did most of my career and just all of my career. Guys, big moments happening at Verbio. Even during COVID last year, they ran a marketplace of writers. Their first writer earned more than $100,000, which is great. Over 3,000 writers on the platform will create about 80,000 pieces of content this year.
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